MARGARET KNIGHT

508-627-8894

(margaret02539@yahoo.com)

Edo Potter’s book, Pimpneymouse Farm, The Last Farm on Chappaquiddick, is finally ready to be shared with friends, neighbors and the general public. It’s about Chappy and her family’s farm from 1932, when Edo first came here, to 1945, when she went off to college. The island was very different then — totally open with no trees except in some of the wet spots. There were very few summer people, and not many year rounders, making it, as Edo says, “a wide open and wonderfully friendly place.” She says, “As children with ponies we had the run of all the island and all the beaches. It was an amazing place to spend long summers, from June 1st to September 30th. I have tried to describe what we did here as children, and why it was such a special place to grow up, very different from nowadays.”

There will be a book release party, with books for sale and signing, at Pimpneymouse Farm from 3 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, May 29. The farm is a few miles up from the ferry, the first left off the tar road after the dyke bridge road to East Beach.

Captain Bob Gilkes was seen driving the Chappy ferry recently. He’s working short shifts to get back in shape after knee surgery. It’s good to see him back where he belongs.

The ferry will be on a semi-summer schedule again this weekend, running straight through until 11:15 p.m. on Friday and Saturday evenings. It returns to the winter schedule on Sunday, May 23, for the week, and then begins the regular summer schedule on Friday, May 28, running from 6:45 a.m. until midnight, seven days a week.

The Chappy firefighters will be leaving the fire house at 9:30 this Sunday morning to go put flags on former firefighters graves in the old Chappy Cemetery on Jeffers’ Lane for Memorial Day. You can meet them at the firehouse or come to the cemetery if you want to help. Kids are welcome.

Mary MacGregor, who has been coming to Chappy from Evansville, Ind., for over 20 years, is asking what’s happened to the lady slippers. There are usually plenty of them blooming in the woods this time of year, but she has hardly seen any, and is wondering why. Is it an off year, or are they dying out for some reason? Have other people seen any?

Mary walks all the trails and beaches of Chappy and often gives me news of interesting or unusual animals or birds she’s seen. This week she outdid herself when she picked up a common Atlantic sundial, a shell found only in the tropics, while walking on a Cape Pogue Pond beach. The shell had lost its shine, probably because of the action of water and sand, so it seems possible it made its way up here from some southern waters — doesn’t it? It’s usually found from the Carolinas south to the West Indies. The shell resembles a winding staircase on its under side – it looks like the inside of a lighthouse, compressed.

On this same walk along Cape Pogue Pond, we noticed many places where horseshoe crabs had buried their eggs. Because the beach there has just a thin layer of sand on top of the rocks underneath, the nesting sites showed up because they were covered with rocks that had surfaced when the crab buried the eggs. It looked as if the crabs had covered their eggs with rocks on purpose, as if to keep the skunks and raccoons from eating them. There were enough sites that it seems hopeful for a good horseshoe crab year, and maybe the rocks will discourage predators. There used to be many horseshoe crabs in the pond before they were overfished.

Chappy is a quiet place, with many of us often spending lots of time alone here, so it’s nice to have someone to talk to sometimes. This spring I’ve been enjoying gardening in the company of my two chickens, who companionably scratch away at the ground along with me. I cluck and talk to them, and they cluck and purr back. I don’t know if talking to birds runs in the family, but I’ve heard that my brother Dick whistles and talks to a screech owl. Dick built and distributed many screech owl nesting boxes on Chappy several years ago, and he has one near his shop with an owl living in it. The owl comes out often during the day to visit with Dick.

For several summers Jo-Ann Tilghman has written the Chappy column, but this year she’s finding herself too busy for the job. Luckily, Brad Woodger has agreed to take on column duties. Brad has entertained us with occasional writings in the Gazette for many years, and he has stood in for me as columnist in the past. Now we’ll get to share his perspective of life on Chappy each week for the next few months, beginning on June 11. I know he expects everyone to send him their birth dates so he can include them in the column — or did he say he hopes people won’t send their birth dates?